Transforming PET imaging with silicon

Several years ago, Anton Toutov was a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, working in the lab of Nobel prize-winning chemist Robert Grubbs. He and a colleague discovered they could make carbon–silicon bonds with a safe and inexpensive potassium catalyst. This ability to make silicon-containing organic molecules without using rare and expensive precious metal catalysts is the basis for a new spin-out company, Fuzionaire Diagnostics, based in California.

The firm’s initial goal is to use potassium catalysis to make positron emission tomography (PET) radiotracers that can diagnose and image a wide variety of diseases, and accelerate drug discovery. Read more.